Kastoria, Greece day Fifteen; we have been on vacation to Greece for nineteen days now. Today’s date is 07 June 2005. We rented an auftokinito (automobile, KIA Picanto to be exact) today and drove to the horrio (village, Mesovraho is the name). Stella wanted to show me around a little more, show me some of the things she used to do when she summered there. When we arrived we met with her Grandfathers brother, Uncle Chrisostomos (Chris). He and his two Albanian friends, the brothers Kadiu, Defrim and Maurem were repairing an old barn type building. The building was originally built using mud and rocks, now where the mud has been washed away by the rain they are replacing it with cement. This has been done to many of the houses that are still standing and in frequent use. It seems to work quite nicely. We were greeted graciously and quickly brought up a hill to see the new well he had built from a spring in the mountain side to water one of his fields. It was fairly large and well built. After he showed us this, he returned to his work, Stella and I continued up the road to take in the view and light a candle at the little “mini church” of which Greece has, most literally, MILLIONS. We have stopped at about 134 of them so far. The next stop on our journey was to the home of her grandparents. We cleaned up the place some and since we were there alone for the first time… looked around a little closer than the last time when her two uncles were there with us. Things looked as if her grandparents went out to do some shopping and never returned. There are still glasses, plates, and spices in the cupboards. The drawers still have tin foil, oven mitts, silver ware, and a pack of cigarettes, Cooper 100’s, with just one having been smoked – the other nineteen remained. The wood burning oven had a pot inside that looked like it was there ready to cook meal that was never made. Ashes from the last few uses still in the burn side of the oven never cleaned out. The two couches and a few boxes are gathered in one corner of the room covered in a plastic painters drop cloth to protect them from dust. One of the two bedrooms has a bed still made up from the last time it was slept in. The other is empty except for a decorative woven blanket that depicts some wildlife scene. We were about to wrap things up there when Chris stopped by and asked us if we wanted to join him for a walk. We agreed. The course we took brought us down the two main roads in the village, past some houses, the church that is no longer in use since the priest had heart surgery and retired. We were taken past the vrici, a spring that is capped off and has a pipe that delivers the water out a hole in a wall and lets it run in to a basin that fills up about one foot deep, one foot wide and about fifteen feet long. This one has a nice roof built over it and the wood work is nicely stained and shines in the sun with a new coat of polyurethane. We climbed up a steep road that was dug out, on the day of our last visit, by a sheep herder that used to work as a bulldozer operator. He still owns his own machine, so that is what he used to make himself a new road to get the sheep from one side of the mountain to the other. At one of the turns near the top of the mountain we veered off the road onto a muddy trail that had fresh BEAR TRACKS on it. This trail led to an area of land that belonged to Stella's grandfather. It was simply beautiful. Then we started down the hillside toward an orchard full of walnut trees. Then down another trail alongside of a creek that led to a vrici that Stella's Great Grandfather built in 1932, I know the exact year because the date is built into it. The area here was very peaceful in a part of the forest that had many old growth trees. In the basin was a baby frog that Stella and I played with like little kids for a few minutes. From here it was a short walk down the trail and we were very near where we had begun two hours before.

¶ 6/07/2005 08:45:00 AM

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